The United States of Trump

THE RED WAVE has engulfed America. The Blue wall lies shattered. Donald Trump is not a fluke, nor an aberra­tion but an established fact of American life. He is the 47th President of the United States of America. Deal with it.

It’s a thunderous political comeback—Trump not only won a clear majority in the Electoral College with 295 votes but he stormed home to the White House with the popular vote too. No mean feat this, because a major Democratic talking point in recent presidential elections has been that they win the people’s vote even if they lose the Electoral College. It was a source of succour, but no longer.

Trump had won four of the so-called seven battleground states and was set to win them all at the time of writing—a scenario even the Republicans hadn’t imagined in their wildest dreams. He breached the Blue wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, a protection Kamala Harris depended on for survival and victory. The Senate has also flipped to the Republicans and they are expected to retain the House of Representatives. It’s a trifecta that will be the policymakers’ delight.

The verdict is a stern rebuke to the Democrats, one they will analyse for months to come once they come out of depression and begin the autopsy. Right now, the shock is too severe and Democratic analysts are in the “if only” phase. If only Joe Biden had abdicated earlier, if only the lawsuits against Trump were filed earlier, if only the party had a proper primary contest to choose the best candidate… What’s wrong with these voters? After all, Harris ran a “flawless” campaign and Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Queen Latifah endorsed her.

It was the three I’s—inflation, illegal im­migration, and insularity—that did it. The first was induced by overstimulating the economy after the pandemic and the sec­ond by not doing enough on border secu­rity even though a quick visit would have opened eyes. Corrective measures came too late and thus, inflation and illegal immigra­tion should go in the category of self-goals. As for insularity—it is Exhibit A for the first two. Far from the madding crowd, the college-educated, high-earning deciders of the Democratic Party have simply lost touch with the people and their problems.

The people wanted “change”. That was the real “vibe” which Democrats papered over by pretending Harris was a new-generation leader full of new ideas, not a quasi-incumbent as the vice president in the widely disliked current administration. A stronger, grassroots politician with more years in the political arena outside the re­public of California may have pulled it off.

Harris came up short even though she did put up a good fight and seemed to equalise the race. All agree that Biden would have been decimated by Trump. So grew the “vibe” that Harris had a real shot at winning. In reality, the polls once again failed to capture the true picture and kept projecting a very tight race. Turns out it wasn’t tight at all. Additionally, she as vice president has the unenviable task of certifying the election and Trump’s victory.

Americans and especially women will mourn that the highest glass ceiling remains intact. Two attempts to break it were stalled by the same man. They will want to know why America failed once again to elect a woman to the highest office. Was it misogyny or weakness of the candidate? Or a bit of both? Harris did enjoy massive support among female voters thanks to Trump’s assault on reproductive rights via the US Supreme Court which he stacked with über-conservative justices the last time round.

While the decimation of Roe vs Wade was a motivating fac­tor in the 2022 midterms, it wasn’t enough now. Shockingly, Harris seems to have performed worse with women compared to Biden in 2020. Preliminary data showed women backed Harris by 8 points while Biden had won them by 12 points. It seems gender overlapped with class.

This, when abortion was the only issue on which Harris seemed to speak from the heart and not from the teleprompter, so to say. On all other issues she seemed programmed and platitudinous while Trump seemed authentic and connected no matter how profane his rhetoric, how rambling his speeches and vile his demeanour. The stark solutions—mass deportations of illegal immigrants, tar­iffs on all imports, no “men” (transgenders) in women’s sports— resonated with voters while Harris’ word salads and itsy-bitsy of­ferings did not. Call it the big picture versus many small pictures.

To the utter shock of Democrats, Trump even managed to make inroads in the Blue bastions of California and New York, signifi­cantly reducing Democratic margins of victory and proving that the status quo is out of favour. His political instincts to hammer on about inflation and illegal immigration appealed to voters across the country, demographic and generational changes that Dems counted on notwithstanding.

But Trump has been stealing slices of the Democratic pie in full view over the past 10 years while Harris/Joe Biden/Barack Obama/ Bill and Hillary Clinton strategists preached to the flock without actually listening to the flock. In addition, the contempt Demo­crats feel for Trump supporters comes through loud and clear even though Harris was super careful not to alienate anyone. While she said she wanted to “earn” every vote, other Democrat biggies have grown so distant that Biden thought it was okay to call Trump supporters “garbage” in the waning days of the campaign. Trump promptly played garbage man, donning the uniform, getting into a truck and exploiting the moment. It was a repeat of 2016 when Hillary Clinton had called his supporters a “basket of deplorables” and “irredeemable”.

WHETHER THE LAST-MINUTE Democrat fiascos impacted voter choices will become clearer in time but what is eminently clear is that an unorthodox political campaign succeeded against a traditional raise-more-money, knock-on-doors approach. Issues mattered more than celebrity endorsements and clear, hard solutions resonated more than a gradualist approach of tinkering at the edges.

The tighter-than-a-leotard race—as the pollsters had the world believe—was a true rollercoaster. It went through a party-induced abdication by Biden in favour of Harris, two failed assassination attempts against Trump, a trudge to the pinnacles of fear and loath­ing, invocations of Hitler and fascism, shifting sands in the world of big money and the entry of Elon Musk into Trump’s camp.

The voters didn’t really love either candidate except the true believers on both sides but they preferred Trump to be the agent of change. He ran a supremely testosterone-driven campaign, showcasing macho wrestlers at rallies while constantly demeaning women but in the end, he didn’t do too badly with women voters. It was always the economy, stupid.

Trump, an instinctual politician, kept it simple. He was on autopilot for the most part and completely undisciplined—or so everyone thought—but his connection with voters was real. On the other side was a candidate struggling to define herself until very late in the game. The game itself was ‘Who Will Save Democracy/ America?’ Saving democracy was an abstraction; saving America (from the riff-raff) was a project. The country was split in half and undecided voters were the unicorns sought by all.

In the fractured political landscape Trump and Harris built coalitions of the unlikely. The axis of polarisation was not a straight­forward right versus left or conservatism versus liberalism but a strange amalgamation of forces pitted against one another. Harris had traditional Democratic voting blocs of minorities, socialists like Bernie Sanders, college-educated liberals, regulation celebrities and CEOs but also disillusioned Republicans like Dick and Liz Cheney who in the end may have been a drag on her campaign as prime “war hawks”. Who doesn’t remember Dick Cheney’s manipula­tions of George W Bush to launch the Iraq War on pretences?

Trump’s coalition stretched from the diehard MAGA people, white working class, union members, sections of black and Latino men, disillusioned Dems like Tulsi Gabbard, popular podcaster Joe Rogan to crypto kings and, of course, Musk whose full-throated support turned X (formerly Twitter) into a platform for Trumpian takes. But the most significant shift was among Hispanic voters—it went up 10 points from 35 per cent in 2020 to 45 per cent in 2024.

The Republican coalition was the “counterrevolution” representing disaffection with the old system of institutions run by Democrats. Voters felt the system had long stopped working for them which was shown most starkly in the 15 per cent support (up seven points from 2020) among black men for Trump. Scoff if you want, as the left does, but Republicans have slowly and steadily become the anti-establishment and working-class party while the Democrats today are identified as the party of the ruling classes. Divided by college degrees, one side feels the other has rigged the game.

Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s 2017 study showed that students from the top 1 per cent were 77 times more likely to get into Ivy League colleges compared to those from families making less than $30,000 a year. Those students then go on to condescend to the “masses” and play victim on college campus­es while paying $90,000 a year in tu­ition fees. An Ipsos poll earlier this year showed 69 per cent of Ameri­cans believe the political elite don’t care or understand the lives of hard-working people and 60 per cent said the “system is broken.”

Yes, Trump is a billionaire and Musk the world’s richest man, but in the wake of the political realignment where woke ideas gener­ated by academics living on the left of the general population travel quickly to NGOs and corporate boardrooms to finally take hold of the Democratic Party’s “thinking class”, common sense opposition was left to the Republicans. When Trump railed about getting “men out of women’s sports”, he was heard by many parents.

It’s time to prepare for Trump’s America where unpredictabil­ity is a strategy and exaggeration is SOP. Dark, ominous warnings about a re-run may not come true but if they do, the world will have to adjust, adapt and accommodate. That’s just life..

A Historic ComebackDonald TrumpKamala HarrisUS Elections 2024US politicsUS Presidential Election 2024